Ardeshir Zahedi, Iran’s flamboyant ambassador to the US in the course of the rule of the shah who charmed each Hollywood stars and politicians together with his lavish events till the 1979 Islamic Revolution, died Thursday at 93, the Iranian state media reported.
Whether or not seen with Henry Kissinger or entertaining Barbra Streisand, Zahedi minimize such a memorable presence throughout Washington’s social scene that one newspaper referred to him as each the “playboy of the Western world” and the capital’s “most-sought-after bachelor.” He was linked romantically to Elizabeth Taylor.
However because the revolution erupted and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, terminally unwell with most cancers, fled the nation, the Iranian Embassy in Washington that hosted Zahedi’s raucous events was deserted and would stand empty for the subsequent 40 years. The revolution swept by means of the nation, putting in the Islamic theocracy that governs the nation right now.
“Iran and America wanted and nonetheless want one another, and it’s of their curiosity to pursue a brand new and constructive strategy of their relations,” Zahedi wrote in 2020 from Switzerland, the place he ultimately settled. “It’s the governments that have to be able to make sacrifices, to indicate goodwill, take away synthetic limitations, and show their sincerity and want to reconcile.”
Iran’s state-run IRNA information company attributed Zahedi’s dying to “outdated age,” with out elaborating. Different semiofficial information businesses in Iran, in addition to the BBC’s Persian service, mentioned he had not too long ago been unwell, with out elaborating.
Zahedi was the son of Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, the person who a 1953 CIA-backed coup towards the nation’s elected prime minister put in in energy, cementing the rule of the younger shah. For individuals who would later overthrow the shah and storm the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, that coup represented the unique sin by America, resulting in the 4 a long time of enmity that adopted.
Zahedi would marry Shahnaz, the shah’s first daughter. Although that marriage lasted solely seven years, the shah thought-about Zahedi as one other son and a trusted advisor. Zahedi would function ambassador to the U.S. and the UK, in addition to Iran’s international minister, earlier than returning to Washington because the shah’s prime diplomat there.
On the time, the shah had quickly modernized his nation with its oil wealth, and expanded its navy with American-manufactured weapons. The U.S. thought-about him a bulwark towards the Soviet Union and operated secret listening posts in Iran to observe its Chilly Warfare enemy.
Zahedi, single once more and again in Washington, threw himself into the capital’s social scene. The Iranian Embassy turned generally known as the “the primary embassy when it got here to extravagance,” Barbara Walters would write in her memoirs. Company munched on caviar and swilled champagne.
Whereas partying, nonetheless, Zahedi maintained shut relationships with each the Nixon and Carter administrations. Together with ambassadors from Egypt and Pakistan, he helped resolve a 1977 hostage disaster in Washington during which two individuals have been killed and over 140 captives freed.
However the shah, who had each restricted all dissent and waffled as his nation more and more discovered itself in turmoil, felt more and more remoted and ended up fleeing. His departure and the revolution the next month introduced an finish to 2,500 years of monarchial rule throughout Persia.
But regardless of dealing with a dying sentence again dwelling and later settling in Switzerland, Zahedi acknowledged the woes that led to the revolution and pushed for a reconciliation between Iran and the U.S. even amid latest tensions over Tehran’s collapsed nuclear take care of world powers. He dismissed President Trump’s maximalist marketing campaign focusing on Tehran as “a stress tactic wrapped in bellicosity folded inside a chimera.”
“It’s bereft of a viable imaginative and prescient and primarily based on the naive assumption that overthrowing the Islamic Republic will miraculously result in a pluralistic and pro-American order,” Zahedi wrote in 2019.
The Iranian Embassy from which he charmed so many sits empty to today, turning into a prop in one 2019 online video by former U.S. Particular Consultant for Iran Brian Hook.
“We sit up for the day after we can return the keys of this embassy to a very consultant Iranian authorities that’s motivated not by a hateful, antiquated revolutionary ideology, however by the pursuits and the need of the nice Iranian individuals,” Hook mentioned. Hook mentioned within the video that the furnishings and rugs as soon as contained in the embassy are held in temperature-controlled storage.
Nonetheless, Zahedi’s liquor cellar didn’t survive the revolution as representatives of the Islamic Republic, who briefly ran the embassy, poured greater than greater than 4,000 bottles of Scotch, champagne and different drinks down a drain.
“It took 4 hours of steady pouring to eliminate all of the alcohol,” an embassy publication mentioned on the time.
